Some stuff from the cuke.com files pertaining to Brian Victoria and
Zen and war and Yasutani and Tricycle etc.
Brian Victoria Page

[from Readers' Comments] 9/3/99--from Dan Kaplan: Wonder if you've seen
the new issue of Tricycle. The series of articles about
Yasutani were of immense interest to me and helped me think through some
issues concerning teacher-student relationships. It is kind of some of the
same stuff I was thinking [in some of his recent comments in Errata under
the Trungpa discussion]. Anyway, thought you'd enjoy the issue if you
hadn't yet read through it. It's got other good articles too.

[Yes, I read all of the pieces on Yasutani-roshi's militaristic,
fascist, and anti-Semitic writings by Brian Victoria, Robert Aitken,
Bodhin Kjolhede, Lawrence Shainberg, and Bernie Glassman. I thought it was
all fascinating. See the response below. I agree that there are other good articles too,
for instance there's a
memorial article on Rick Fields. To see more, go to the Tricycle link at www.tricycle.com--DC]
[now to get the Victoria article and responses you have to buy issue #33.
If anyone's got it and can email it to me please do. - DC]

Brian Victoria's book, Zen at War was in the bibliography for Crooked
Cucumber. I was delighted with it and got hold of Brian in Australia--or
maybe he got hold of me first. We had some messages go back and forth
about Shunryu Suzuki's conduct and attitude during the war (which I'll get
back to at a latter date). Anyway, I tried to do a little promoting of
Brian's book and invited him here to Sonoma County and John Tarrant had
Brian speak to his Zen group (after a nice downtown dinner).

Brian was a
gas. He spoke to us for a while about the topic of the near total support
by the Japanese Zen sects (and everyone else there Buddhist and
Christian) for Japan's militarism throughout Japan's history, focusing on
this century. Then he went behind a screen and came back out in the
uniform of a Japanese Army officer (or was it the robes of the Zen priest
who advised the Army officer--I can't remember now--I've got a call in to
John on it). Anyway, what he did was to give us the spiel of Imperial
Buddhism with the Emperor above Buddha and all good Buddhists ready to
give their lives for their Emperor. It was heart-felt and a little wacky. He really had it down. He took
questions and answered as if he were that person.

It is to John and his
group's credit that they didn't freak out at Victoria's scathing attack on
Yasutani's wartime and post-wartime political opinions. (John studied with
Aitken-roshi who studied with Yasutani-roshi.) Brian Victoria's research
and writings are a big eye-opener for all of us. It's so great we have room
for this sort of information in our new American Buddhism. He has an awfully
aggressive approach, pretty warlike actually, a sort of Buddhist soldier
out to set the record straight and be sure it doesn't happen again. I
think he may be so gung ho about exposing this embarrassing and awful
history because he has a bit of it in his blood that he's channeled toward
a more righteous goal than massacring the enemy but that's just my
layman's hunch. I too can feel the heat of fanaticism boiling in my veins
if I make an effort to conjure it up and this alerts me to be ever
vigilant and to look for the wool over my eyes.

One of Brian's main points, indeed, seems to be "may it never
happen again." He sees that in the name of that most divine, whole
nations and peoples have gone amuck in slaughter and insanity not only in
the West but in the recently sacrosanct East as well, and he doesn't want
us to repeat it. He wants for us in the West to acknowledge the aggressions
and sins of our Buddhist ancestors and to renounce the way of the sword so
prominent in Japanese Buddhism. It's a cause worth considering I should
think. I mentioned it to abbot Norman Fisher at Green Gulch once and he
was interested. And it wasn't the first time he'd considered it. He
already knew others who would be interested. But this won't mean that my
sons can't practice martial arts anymore without our being shunned does
it?

I'll look up our correspondence and check the details later, but for
now here's what I remember about Brian's past. His resume lists his
ethnicity as Amerindian. He's from some place like Indiana or Illinois. He was a Christian CO, conscientious
objector to military service, who went to Japan in 1961 to do his
alternative service. (That's a really committed CO--there wasn't any
fighting going on then.) He ended up getting interested in Zen as a
result, I believe, on a visit to Eiheiji, the ancient huge Soto Zen
monastery founded by Dogen. There he was ordained as a monk by Sotan Tatsugami
roshi in 1964 (who's mentioned in Crooked Cucumber because he led
practice periods at Tassajara while Suzuki was alive).

Brian went to
college in Japan, I think to Komazawa, the Soto Zen university, and he
graduated. That's amazing. He studied with Yokoi-roshi, a disciple of
Kishizawa Ian's who taught at
Komazawa (who Shunryu Suzuki greatly respected--remember the mention in
Crooked Cucumber when Suzuki went to Yokoi to see if he'd be interested in
leading a practice period at Tassajara and after the visit Brian asked
Yokoi what he thought and Yokoi said, "In terms of Japan, he's a
typical country priest." [Nihon ni totte futsu no inaka no bosan
desu]. Brian also studied with Yasutani briefly and received
transmission from Asada Daisen, abbot of Jokuin.

I remember hearing about Brian when I was living at Tassajara in the
'60s. He was involved with radical student groups and in demonstrations.
Someone told me they saw his photo in the paper over there--on the front
page--demonstrating. He was opposing the war in Vietnam mainly I think but there were
some other issues. (I'll have to find all this in my old desktop and write
it up better). He got arrested finally and his case went on for years,
maybe like twelve years (I was always reading in Japan about thirty year
old cases getting to the Supreme court--like cases of industrial
pollution), and went all the way to the supreme court of Japan. I think he
lost (people tend to lose there). He was finally deported for this and
flew right away to Korea where he immediately was deported for publicly demanding the release of political prisoners. And then the same thing
happened in Taiwan. The guy's been deported from more countries than most
people ever get to.

Brian was very helpful to me with the parts I wrote about the war in
CC. We were corresponding via email while he was still in New Zealand and
I sent him just about everything I'd written about the war and Suzuki and
all. So after his presentation to John Tarrant's group, he and Fred
Harriman, a translator who has helped me a lot, came over to my house and
Fred finally left at two and Brian and I got through everything by three
and he got some sleep.

As soon as we had arrived at my house he had pulled out my
manuscript which had notes all over it, especially in the margin. I
noticed words like Documents! Proof! He held me to a high
standard. He's a scholar. I told him that I'm just a hearsay reporter--I
report what I hear and what people say. He found a lot of what I said very
hard to believe but listened to my reasons for saying what I did.

Brian helped me considerably that night. He went over his objections to
certain things I'd said, one by one, and challenged me strongly. One thing I
made more clear after our talk was that Suzuki's main challenges to the
assumptions of militarism were before the war. Indeed, Suzuki himself said so. But Taro
Kato, the young man who went with him to Manchuria the last year of the
war, said that during the war Rinsoin was a unique place devoid of the
gloom felt in most places and also devoid of pro-war slogans and propaganda.

Brian pointed out what he felt were impossible contradictions, like some
people feeling uneasy about the salon going on at Rinsoin and the tone of their meetings, and then Suzuki being
offered some sort of position as head of a Soto Zen office of encouraging support for the
war effort. Brian said that the Soto Shu was so nervous about
doing anything at all wrong that they would have only selected someone
completely untainted by any rumors or doubts for such a position. This is
one contradiction I left in because Suzuki said both things. He didn't
make a big deal out of it. He only mentioned those things a few times, but
they are part of the mosaic, some shards found in the dust of the past that give a
picture of something that happened way back then. I tended to put down
what he said and what others said and if it all didn't fit well too bad.
If anyone was mistaken or lying then I was merely a vessel to keep their
errors alive.

Maybe Brian and I had originally met in cyberspace when he got hold of
me about Shunryu Suzuki's wartime activities. He was looking into the origin of
the comment in the introduction to ZMBM that Suzuki had led a pacifist
movement in Japan during the war. He'd called up Rinsoin while in Japan
and had talked to Hoitsu, Suzuki's son and heir and asked him about that.
I've got Brian's note on this somewhere but as I remember it, Hoitsu said
to him something like, "I don't know where these rumors come from but
there's nothing to them. My father did nothing during the war different
from any other priests." Something like that. I've heard Hoitsu say
stuff like that a lot. Hoitsu once said to me, "My father did nothing
during the war but put his head in his hands and go 'duh.'"

Hoitsu was very resistant to any line of questioning in this area that I
pursued. He has a good deal of resentment toward his father and really
gets tired of the big deal everyone makes of him in America. He said to me
several times, "It would be wrong to characterize my father as a
special person in your book." Once when he said that in front of
Suzuki's former student Amano, one of the High Grass Mt. Group, the young
men who lived and studied with him during the war, Amano firmly
countered Hoitsu. "Your father was most certainly a special
man!" and he reiterated to Hoitsu how different Rinsoin was from
anywhere else at that time and how free they were to express themselves. But he sees it in terms of a sincere spirit
that rose above the confusion of the times more than in terms of actively seeking
peace. Over and over people told me that you couldn't utter the word peace
then. But at other times people would say that you could talk of peace if
it was in terms of what was best for Japan and not in terms of Japan
loosing the war and that such talk did go on at Rinsoin right up to the
end of the war. But Brian made the point when I said that, that he was
sure their point was that they didn't want their country to be destroyed,
not that they didn't want people to die. There is something to that. I
have no record of Suzuki talking about war being wrong because it kills
people and other living things. He spoke more of confusion and did say
that if the army got its way all of Japan would be destroyed.

Anyway, after some effort, I finally convinced Hoitsu that I wasn't out
to glorify his father and he helped me to meet people and conduct
interviews. And Fred Harriman followed and did some more interviews and
adding what people said who knew him during the war with what Suzuki had
said, I got the picture I put together in CC. There certainly was no
pacifist movement there or anywhere else in Japan, but he did what he could and that was quite a bit to
those who were with him at that time. I think we over-interpreted Suzuki's
role during the war because when he told us the stories he did, which was
rarely, it was during the Vietnam War, and we tended to see his situation
in Japan during WWII in terms of our experience in America where open
opposition was going on all over.

I'll be working on refining this part of the story further. I'll maybe
open up a special section for it here on the site and put everything I've
got on it. I'm hoping that some associates can do some follow-up
interviews in Japan this fall to clarify some vagaries in the story. Fred Harriman is reviewing
some existing material on it, tapes
and documents in Japanese. And I'd love to get more clear on the story of Nishinakama,
who was for some time like the head student under Suzuki during the war, a firebrand,
and according to the students I talked to, a co-leader of the discussions
that went on at Rinsoin. Amano said that it was Nishinakama, not Shunryu
Suzuki, who talked
about ending the war and that his story is not known by most Japanese and
should be. I get the picture always of Suzuki being very quiet and letting
others talk. He was certainly that way in meetings with us. But when he
did say something, usually something brief, people took note.

Anyway, Brian Victoria in the end, I felt, was quite kind and
understanding of my approach which is so different from his. That's why in
the acknowledgements I thusly thank him under "For scholarly information and
suggestions :..Brian Victoria, who commented on the sections about Shunryu
Suzuki and Japan's militaristic period, with thanks for his skeptical
tolerance for my unscholarly narrative method."

[from Digressions] 9/4/99--I've edited the bit called further comments by me on
Brian Victoria. Andbelow there's more concerning
Dan Kaplan's note of 9/3 from Readers' Comments
and repeated at the bottom of the aforementioned bit on Brian
Victoria.

The only thing that I can remember Suzuki-roshi saying about Jews is
second-hand. One of his old students from Japan said that once when he was
back in Japan visiting that Suzuki was telling him about his American
students and that he said it seemed that those from Jewish backgrounds
took to Buddhism more easily. And I found a quote from Hoitsu about that
too:

"My father often said it was easier for those from Jewish background
to understand Buddhism than for those from Christian background, as
followers have direct connection with God in Judaism, while there is a
mediator, Christ, between followers and God in Christianity. It must be
easy for Jewish people to understand Amidism especially. There are quite a
few Jewish people at Zen Center."

I've always found Japanese to be fascinated with the idea of Jewish people
and culture and I got the feeling they suspect there's something they
share in being one people which is how many Japanese see themselves. But
I've also experienced a sort of timidity by Japanese when they speak of
Jews, afraid they might be saying something wrong.

One Suzuki family member said to me not long ago, "Now don't get
me wrong, I have no prejudice against Jewish people, I am just curious.
All three of your abbots are Jewish aren't they? And the next one is
Jewish. Are Jewish people taking over the Zen Center?

I said that it might seem so but that these students of Jewish ancestry
were Zen students primarily, and like the Japanese who were interred during
the war for fear that their loyalty would be to Japan and not to America,
would probably not appreciate someone seeing them as a Jew first and a
Buddhist second. And I pointed out that Jewish-Americans have just
excelled in so many intellectual and spiritual fields.

But then again there have been a lot of Texans in Zen Center too and we
do plan to take it over in time.--DC